For Berkeley, minds are not Cartesian spiritual substances because they cannot be said to exist (even if only conceptually) abstracted from their activities. Similarly, Berkeley's notion of mind differs from Locke's in that, for Berkeley, minds are not abstract substrata in which ideas inhere. Instead, Berkeley redefines what it means for the mind to be a substance in a way consistent with the Stoic logic of 17th century Ramists on which Leibniz and Jonathan Edwards draw. This view of mind, I (...) conclude, is definitely not the bundle theory that some critics have portrayed it as being. (shrink)

This book offers novel interpretations of several of Berkeley's most distinctive philosophical doctrines, including his theory of vision, heterogeneity thesis, anti-abstractionism, immaterialism, likeness principle, and the divine language thesis. Key to those interpretations is a focus on Berkeley's critical use of the Cartesian doctrine of objective presence, which demands causal explanations for the content of sensory ideas.

In ‘Berkeley and God’, Jonathan Bennett diagnoses Berkeley's intermittent advocacy of the proposition that physical things ‘do sometimes exist when not perceived by any human spirit’ by pinning on him the invalid argument, vitiated by the ambiguity of ‘depend’, from all ideas depend on some spirit or other, via some sensible ideas do not depend on these spirits themselves, to some ideas depend on non-finite spirits.

In An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision Berkeley introduces the notion of suggestion as an alternative to those accounts of perception he labels the "mathematicians' account". Both kinds of accounts are offered to explain how we visually perceive the distance of an object which is itself not immediately perceived. I examine in depth the mathematicians' account as found in Descartes, Malebranche and Molyneux, along with Berkeley's several criticisms of this approach. I also explicate Berkeley's alternative theory according to (...) which distance is perceived, not by means of geometrical reasoning, but rather by means of correlations between visual and tactile sensations. ;The foregoing lays the foundation for my central concern, namely Berkeley's theory of perception. Crucial to this theory is Berkeley's notion of suggestion, about which Berkeley says very little. Recent accounts of this notion, found in the writings of Alan Donagan and George Pitcher, characterize Berkeley's notion of suggestion as issuing in a perceptual judgment. I argue that closer attention to the development of the theory, especially in his works following the NTV, reveals that such an interpretation saddles Berkeley with a theory of perception which he attributes to his opponents, one which he explicitly rejects. ;On my interpretation, Berkeley's notion of suggestion is not inferential and does not yield perceptual judgments. Instead, suggestion is an activity of the imagination which retrieves information registered from past visual and tactile experiences, and issues in an expectation of similar sensations. The advantage of this interpretation is twofold. It allows for infants and beasts to perceive objects and their properties, something that distinguishes Berkeley from his predecessors. Furthermore, on this interpretation, Berkeley's theory sharply contrasts with those of Malebranche and Descartes, as Berkeley himself intended; this is a result that is not forthcoming on the Pitcher/Donagan interpretation. I further argue that this analysis of suggestion, with its emphasis on the role of the imagination, accommodates Berkeley's more general view of the mind and serves to underscore the ontological differences between Berkeley and his opponents. (shrink)

In the present work Berkeley's theory of vision is considered in its historical origins, in its relation to Berkeley's general philosophical conceptions, and in its early reception. Berkeley's theory replaces an account of vision according to which distance and other spatial properties are deduced from elementary data through an unconscious geometric inference. This account of vision in terms of "natural geometry" was first introduced by Descartes and Malebranche. Among Berkeley's immediate sources of knowledge of the geometric theory of perception, a (...) key role was played by the treatise of dioptrics of William Molyneux, Dioptrica Nova. Berkeley's understanding of "natural geometry" relies closely on Molyneux's description of the mechanism of vision which avoids the complexities of the accounts of Descartes and Malebranche. In the first chapter Berkeley's theory is presented by way of contrast with Molyneux's theory. In the second chapter I consider the relation between the theory of vision and immaterialism. In the final chapter I examine one of the first criticisms of Berkeley's theory, that which is found in William Porterfield's Treatise on the Eye. Dept. of Philosophy. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1997 .G72. Source: Masterss International, Volume: 37-01, page: 0076. Adviser: John P. Wright. Thesis --University of Windsor , 1997. (shrink)

George Berkeley opens the Principles (Part I) with "a Survey of the Objects of Human Knowledge" including such ideas "as are perceiv'd by attending to the Passions and Operations of the Mind." Scholars have rejected this passage as being "philosophically impossible," not seriously meant, just a reference to John Locke's ideas of reflection, or not at all about "ideas." It is true, in a few unpublished manuscripts Berkeley used the term "ideas" for image-pictures of particular things (the Old Paradigm). But, (...) I argue, in the Theory of Vision he develops a New Paradigm; and if we follow Berkeley's advice to read his book "in the order [he] published them," then his "Survey of the Objects of Human Knowledge" makes perfect sense in the light of this New Paradigm. (shrink)

Clues about what Berkeley was planning to say about mind in his now-lost second volume of the Principles seem to abound in his Notebooks. However, commentators have been reluctant to use his unpublished entries to explicate his remarks about spiritual substances in the Principles and Dialogues for three reasons. First, it has proven difficult to reconcile the seemingly Humean bundle theory of the self in the Notebooks with Berkeley's published characterization of spirits as “active beings or principles.” Second, the fact (...) that Berkeley did not publish his Notebooks insights on mind has led some to claim that he later rejected his early views. Third, many of the Notebooks entries on mind have a ‘+’ sign next to them, which has been understood for decades to comprise a Black List of views about which Berkeley had doubts or subsequently rejected. In my dialogue, I describe how Berkeley's “congeries” account of mind (1) differs from Hume's bundle theory in a way that complements Berkeley's published remarks and (2) undercuts the claim that he later rejected his early views. Most importantly, (3) I show how a careful analysis of the British Library manuscript of the Notebooks refutes the Black List hypothesis. (shrink)

This is a response to Stavroula Glezakos’ commentary on my paper, in which I address three main points: (1) whether Berkeley is entitled to argue via inference to the best explanation, (2) whether Berkeley’s likeness principle might be too strict, and (3) whether the texts support my reading.

It is sometimes suggested that Berkeley adheres to an empirical criterion of meaning, on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies an idea (i.e., an immediate object of perceptual experience). This criterion is thought to underlie his rejection of the term ‘matter’ as meaningless. As is well known, Berkeley thinks that it is impossible to perceive matter. If one cannot perceive matter, then, per Berkeley, one can have no idea of it; if one can have no idea (...) of it, then one cannot speak meaningfully of it. But if this is Berkeley’s position, then there is a puzzle, because Berkeley also explicitly claims that it is impossible to perceive/have ideas of minds. So if he is relying on a criterion on which terms get their meaning by referring to ideas, then, just as Berkeley rejects talk of material substance, so, too, must he reject talk of mental substance. Famously, however, Berkeley insists that there is no parity between the cases of material and mental substance. It is typically suggested that the disparity between matter and minds rests on the fact that although one cannot strictly speaking perceive minds, nonetheless Berkeley thinks that one can have experiential access to minds via reflection, and that this access allows for meaningful talk of minds. Of course, one can only have reflective experience of one’s own mind. But what of other minds, which one cannot reflectively experience? Here the usual tactic is to suppose that, although one cannot have direct reflective experience of other minds, nonetheless one can indirectly experience such minds via analogy to our own minds, and that this indirect experience grounds the meaningfulness of talk of other minds. In this paper, I argue that the reasoning behind Berkeley’s ‘likeness principle,’ that an idea can only be like another idea, can be generalized to argue against this experience-based account of our access to other minds. I claim instead that Berkeley allows for the meaningfulness of talk of other minds by expanding the criterion of meaning in a different way. I argue that Berkeley holds a criterion of meaning on which a term is meaningful just in case it signifies either an object of experience or an object that one has reason to posit on the basis of experience, i.e., an object that is necessary to explain our experiences. When an object is neither experienced nor explains our experiences, then and only then is Berkeley willing to reject it as meaningless. Thus he writes of “the word matter,” that “it is no matter whether there is such a thing or no, since it no way concerns us: and I do not see the advantage there is in disputing about we know not what, and we know not why” (Principles, §77.) The word is not meaningless merely because we do not know what matter might be; it is meaningless because we also do not know why it should be. Correspondingly, I argue that the term ‘mind’ is meaningful because although we have no experience of minds, nonetheless they play an important role in explaining our experiences. (shrink)